Mr. Freud in the Family Office

By Robert Milburn

The kids are getting older, and it’s time to seriously start the family-wealth discussion. But you’re hesitant to inform the hormonal bunch because they’ve inherited your hard-charging stubbornness. Conversations easily and often go nuclear.

St. Louis-based Matter Family Office, which manages $2.5 billion for wealthy families in St. Louis and Denver, claims to have a path through such issues in its specially-created program. Before any signed-up family member is allowed a seat at the wealth-discussion table, they must first fill out a personality questionnaire. An algorithm then spits out a pie chart with percentages scoring each person as, say, a “clear thinker,” “empathic” or “enjoys the unusual.”

Joseph Sohm/AGE Fotostock

Clients of Matter Family Office in St. Louis take a personality test before they discuss their wealth.

Sounds lightweight, but family-therapy counselor Courtney Pullen, head of The Pullen Consulting Group, who was brought in by Matter, weaves this patchwork of pie-chart psych traits into a broader dialogue on topics like family governance. After that, Matter officers step in to produce concrete and actionable plans out of some of the discussions. Pullen charges from $4,000 (for a 1-day personality test with follow-up family chat) to $20,000 (for a biannual retreat, not including travel expenses.) Matter’s clients get up to a 12.5% discount.

Roughly half of the firm’s clients have been through the program, says Matter CEO Kathy Lintz. Might sound hokey to some, but the goal, she says, is to stop the “teaching and preaching” and instead get families “listening and learning.” The program’s premise—which alone might send a type-A personality into an apoplectic fury– is that everyone should have a say in family decision-making.

Thomas Hillman, 59 years old, runs St. Louis-based FTL Capital, which seeds and buys controlling stakes in privately-held businesses. Hillman says he has started fifteen companies, bought and sold an additional fifty, has homes in St. Louis and Denver, and has been a Matter client for seven years.

He became one after a family friend grilled him on his estate and governance planning, and Hillman stammered clueless answers. He knew then he had to get up to speed. After following Lintz and Matter for five years, he signed on as a client. “I didn’t look to them to make me more money. I had done that myself,” he says. What he needed was help with family governance, asset protection and estate planning.

Or so he thought. The ghostly specter hovering over all discussions was Thomas’s great-grandfather, a wealthy hotelier who built the five-star George V hotel in Paris, now owned by Four Seasons, only to lose his fortune during the Great Depression. “Our family had an intellectual acumen for entrepreneurship that somehow dwindled,” he says, and he wanted his offspring to maintain that self-starting drive.

The family discussions took off when Thomas’ oldest son, Max, and his two younger siblings, all aged 19 to 25, were in college, and Matter began facilitating formal family meetings at least twice a year. Their initial personality tests revealed “we are all extraverted, social people, who take on a lot of projects,” Max says. All good qualities, he says, but sometimes “we’re all fighting to get a word in.”

Formally identifying communication issues, big and small, made all the difference. Now, when a family member calls Max, he knows to either give them his undivided attention, and stop scrolling through emails on his phone, or be upfront and suggest another time for them to talk. “It helped us understand the good family qualities, but also where we might frustrate each other simply because it’s how we’re naturally wired,” he says. And having a third party point out those issues created “a safe environment” to talk about them.

The air cleared, the Hillmans have since dug deep into their family legacy and codified their essence. They collectively decided that entrepreneurship, integrity and the importance of independence are values to be cherished and passed on, not neglected and sidelined. “My kids know it would break our hearts if they were labelled as trust fund babies. We want them to find joy, fulfillment and a sense of purpose,” Thomas says.

Four years ago, Max co-founded Link Strategy Group, a marketing agency that has grown from three to thirteen clients. Identifying the family’s core traits, including entrepreneurial energy, has helped them all. “We’re taking the values of my great grandparent’s generation forward,” he says proudly.

If true and lasting, a little psych-speak is really a very tiny price to pay.

About Penta

Written with Barron’s wit and often contrarian perspective, Penta provides the affluent with advice on how to navigate the world of wealth management, how to make savvy acquisitions ranging from vintage watches to second homes, and how to smartly manage family dynamics.

Richard C. Morais, Penta’s editor, was Forbes magazine’s longest serving foreign correspondent, has won multiple Business Journalist Of The Year Awards, and is the author of two novels: The Hundred-Foot Journey and Buddhaland, Brooklyn. Sonia Talati is Penta’s reporter about town, both online and for the magazine. She previously worked for the Wall Street Journal and various television station affiliates around the country. Sonia has a B.A. in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an M.A. from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.